In recent years, various techniques for crystallizing or improving the crystallinity of an amorphous or polycrystalline semiconductor film have been investigated. This technology is used in the manufacture of a variety of devices, such as image sensors and active-matrix liquid-crystal display (AMLCD) devices. In the latter, a regular array of thin-film transistors (TFT) is fabricated on an appropriate transparent substrate, and each transistor serves as a pixel controller.
Semiconductor films are processed using excimer laser annealing (ELA), in which a region of the film is irradiated by an excimer laser to partially melt the film and then is crystallized. The process typically uses a long, narrow beam shape that is continuously advanced over the substrate surface, so that the beam can potentially irradiate the entire semiconductor thin film in a single scan across the surface ELA produces homogeneous small grained polycrystalline films; however, the method often suffers from microstructural non-uniformities which can be caused by pulse to pulse energy density fluctuations and/or non-uniform beam intensity profiles.
Sequential lateral solidification (SLS) using an excimer laser is one method that has been used to form high quality polycrystalline films having large and uniform grains. SLS produces large grains and controls the location of grain boundaries. A large-grained polycrystalline film can exhibit enhanced switching characteristics because the number of grain boundaries in the direction of electron flow is reduced. SLS systems and processes are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,322,625, 6,368,945, and 6,555,449 issued to Dr. James Im, and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/390,537, the entire disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference, and which are assigned to the common assignee of the present application.
In an SLS process, an initially amorphous (or small grain polycrystalline) film is irradiated by a very narrow laser beamlet. The beamlet is formed by passing a laser beam through a patterned mask, which is projected onto the surface of the film. The beamlet melts the amorphous film, which then recrystallizes to form one or more crystals. The crystals grow primarily inward from edges of the irradiated area. After an initial beamlet has crystallized a portion of the amorphous film, a second beamlet irradiates the film at a location less than the lateral growth length from the previous beamlet. In the newly irradiated film location, crystal grains grow laterally from the crystal seeds of the polycrystalline material formed in the previous step. As a result of this lateral growth, the crystals attain high quality along the direction of the advancing beamlet. The elongated crystal grains are separated by grain boundaries that run approximately parallel to the long grain axes, which are generally perpendicular to the length of the narrow beamlet. See FIG. 6 for an example of crystals grown according to this method.
When polycrystalline material is used to fabricate electronic devices, the total resistance to carrier transport is affected by the combination of barriers that a carrier has to cross as it travels under the influence of a given potential. Due to the additional number of grain boundaries that are crossed when the carrier travels in a direction perpendicular to the long grain axes of the polycrystalline material or when a carrier travels across a large number of small grains, the carrier will experience higher resistance as compared to the carrier traveling parallel to long grain axes. Therefore, the performance of devices such as TFTs fabricated on polycrystalline films will depend upon both the crystalline quality and crystalline orientation of the TFT channel relative to the long grain axes.
Devices that use a polycrystalline thin film often do not require that the entire thin film have the same system performance and/or mobility orientation. For example, the mobility requirements for the TFT column and row drivers (the integration regions) are considerably greater than for the pixel controllers or pixel regions. Processing the entire film surface, e.g., the integration regions and the pixel regions, under the conditions necessary to meet the high mobility requirements of the integration regions can be inefficient and uneconomical since excess irradiation and processing time of the lower performance regions of the thin film may have been expended with no gain in system performance.